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Valencia has a new contemporary art center, raised this time with the very positive balance that Mercadona points to in the profit account year after year. Hortensia Herrero, vice president of the company and wife of Juan Roig, She is one of those few wealthy people who can spend forty million euros to buy a palace in ruins., Renovate it from top to bottom and add a new building to house the important art collection that has been amassed over the last ten years with the advice of Javier Molins.. Herrero says that on her first wedding anniversary she asked her husband for a painting as a gift and that's where it all started..
The architectural challenge during the seven years that the renovation has lasted has been to remove enough walls for exhibition purposes from a 17th century Valeriola Palace intended at the time to be inhabited., and do it, besides, in the historic center of the city on the protected ruins of Roman Valencia, Visigoth, islamic, Jewish and Christian. With these wickers, it may happen that, where you had planned to build the toilets, the remains of a medieval oven appear, or that in the basement the archaeological remains of a Roman circus emerge. The old palace has grown a modern building that serves to reach the seventeen rooms spread over four levels that make up a continuous route.. The two buildings are linked by a corridor made of mineral motifs designed by Cristina Iglesias. It is one of the six site specific that mark the building at the invitation of the patron, the only one designed by a woman. Olafur Eliasson has given life to another of the hallways, a tunnel made with 1035 crystals of different size and design containing all the colors of the rainbow, but they turn black when the visitor looks back, Jaume Plensa has filled the apse that connects the palace with the garden with a vine of letters from different alphabets in the world - until now, his letters had always constructed human figures—, Tomas Saraceno has hung in the lobby six clouds made up of irregular tetrahedra and dodecahedra covered by iridescent panels, Sean Scully the old chapel has been intervened, y Mat Collishaw is inspired by the Fallas, in fire as a transforming element, in a video installation that places the visitor in the middle of the flames with their crackling.
The collection houses the work of some of the most internationally recognized artists of the 20th and 21st centuries. (mainly), total, more than one hundred works by more than fifty top-level artists, some of them, Valencians: Julian Opie, Anselm Kiefer, Carlos Cruz-Diez, Manolo Valdes, Anthony Tapias, Eduardo Chillida, Joan Miró, Antonio Saura, Miquel Barceló, Julio González, Juan Genovés o Andrew Alfaro, among others, and the authors of the works that every year since 2014 buys the foundation at the Abierto Valencia event with which the Valencian galleries inaugurate the season. Below we highlight a small Olympus of great art totems that can be enjoyed at the new Hortensia Herrero Art Center. Alexander Calder is in the house! From the pioneer of kinetic art we can see his mobile Black and yellow dots in the air (1960), a magnificent example of the abstract and kinetic art that brought him fame in the 20th century, when sculptures decided that they did not need a pedestal to survive, that could hang and move. The father of art brut, Jean Dubuffet, exhibits a sculpture Hourloupe, the longest and most fruitful cycle of his career, the most recognizable to the general public. He limited his color palette to white., the Red, black and blue to outline ambiguous figures that are assembled like a puzzle within sculptures cut with hot thread in expanded polystyrene. Roy Lichtenstein, a symbol of American pop art, He wanted to break with the abstract expressionism that dominated the New York scene and turned his attention to comics and advertising., where he extracted iconic images of Mickey Mouse or Popeye. The works in the collection are inspired by Monet's water lily paintings and incorporate the Ben-Day dots, name given to four-color dots (rojo, negro, azul, yellow and white) what, combined, create new ones in the brain. David Hockney, ultra-renowned for its swimming pools, changes of season bring us to Valencia. In the video creation The four seasons The artist has filmed a forest with nine moving cameras at four times of the year to capture the variations of the landscape. On the other hand, During the confinement caused by the COVID-19 pandemic, he painted Around the house, an elongated frieze of the surroundings of his house in Nomandía to capture, again, the differences that occur between winter and summer in the same landscape. Hockney discovered the iPad when he was eighty and hasn't put it down since.
Anish Kapoor, one of the main exponents of what has been called the new British sculpture, polishes the stainless steel surface until it becomes almost mirror-like. So, incorporates the viewer and the environment into the work, circumstance that occurs in the concave circle called Ramdom triangle mirror(2013). The Ghanaian The Anatsui He began producing large-scale works from metal waste in the late 1990s to reflect on colonialism —many waste elements come from that time—, consumerism and the environment. The Hortensia Herrero collection has one of these works, Default (2016), made with alcohol bottle caps joined with copper wires. In the room dedicated to multimedia art, the international art collective teamLab exposes The world of irreversible change, an interactive installation that responds to the behavior of viewers. In the Japanese village it is night and day, rain or shine, is it winter or summer, depending on what is happening in Valencia, and the changes have repercussions on the environment and the behavior of the characters that coexist on the screen. They will react if you touch them and will go back to what they were doing when you leave them alone., But if there is too much touching, a war will break out., There will be deaths and the village will end up engulfed in flames until it is in ruins., without human trace. The seasons and weather conditions will take their course and, at the time, nature will bloom again, but human life will be over forever, there will be no turning back. Finally, we highlight the Mat Collishaw who, inspired by the remains of the ancient Roman circus found in the art center during commissioning works, has built a gigantic four-ton oval LED screen that, hanging from the ceiling, pays tribute to the chariot races. The horses walk, They trot and gallop over the noise of an excited crowd that cheers them. Here ends an artistic tour of the taste of Mrs. Hortensia Herrero made available to Valencians upon payment of nine euros (On Sundays admission is free) in a new art center that has aroused much expectation. S.M.
